The Boys From 37 Signals on Wired

Wired magazine has a very good feature on Jason Fried and David Heinemeir Hansson of 37 Signals. It talks about how they got together, the fans of their Ruby on Rails web application network and the applications developed by RoR. It's quite incredible that before Heinemeir developed BaseCamp, the first application created using Ruby on Rails, it was considered by most developers to be too slow and limited to be of much use. It is quite ironic that today Ruby on Rails is recognised for its speed and versatility and according to Wired:

"an adept programmer can create a simple blogging application in 15 minutes or a photo database in five. Two guys built Twitter in two weeks."

Apart from Twitter, the popular web applications Odeo, 43 Things and Writeboard were all created using RoR. There are some great quotes in the article which have been lifted from 37 Signals' blog Signal vs Noise. Let me share some of them with you:

"If BusinessWeek wants to say it only takes $50 and an internet connection to be the next mogul they may want to cite a valid example. It's certainly possible, but Digg isn't that example."

"Windows in general has been like a confused and slow person. Vista is like a person who lost their meds and is trying their best to ignore the voices."

"What's with the social bookmarking icons at the bottom of every single friggin' blog post out there? ... The hectoring is tiresome, it results in extraneous visual noise, and the benefits are dubious at best."

"An open letter to people who wear those Bluetooth headsets that blink: ... That blue light that blinks incessantly can't actually be seen by you. The rest of us, however, do see it. And it annoys us. Stop."

"Only in the perverted world of the Web can something as simple and fundamental as making money be in need of a fancy word like monetize.'